I want to welcome all of our campuses in today because we've all just seen this joyous moment of people being baptized and I want to celebrate what God is doing in people's lives. It's all about one more changed life. Last week, a little girl named Adeline came up to me and during the service at some point she had written on a crayon, with a crayon, a little kind note to me talking about how Jesus had changed her life, and like her whole family has been different since they started coming to North Place, and he's changing them, and that she's looking forward to being baptized. And so every one of these stories of baptism is a celebration of generational life change. And I just want to say thank you to North Place, the way you serve, the way you give. You're not just impacting people, you're impacting generations to come. We're gonna make a big difference. Today we had a really unique, I want to bring you into it, a really unique opportunity in our earliest service here in Saxey, and I want to bring you into that moment just because it doesn't happen all the time. We launched a campus in a in a in a prison years ago, huge unit, Gatesville, Texas, built incredible relationships with them. There is a man that was inside the unit, he's been in there 31 years. Uh he was transformed by Jesus inside that unit, Michael Hubbard. His life was changed dramatically in there, became a man of God, got a four-year seminary degree while he was on the inside. He became a field minister for us. He directed our dream team, ran our hospitality ministry. He has led our follow-up and care ministry. He led our freedom ministries, a lot of small groups that we do inside the unit. He's just been such an asset to planting North Place inside that prison. Um, just this last week, he paroled out, and his number one request of his parole officer is I want to go to church at North Place on the outside on my first Sunday out. Um, at eight o'clock this morning at our eight o'clock campus service. He was in Saxe. I don't know if they got a photo of Michael and I. He was here today. This incredible. It's it was beautiful. Michael's been such a good brother, such a blessing to this church. And today he was moved by the welcome. And I wanted you to know that because he is one life impacted, used by God, because of the space that you provided for him. Like the way there's so many of you that go and serve in that unit. Uh, so many of you give. Your faithfulness is why I can tell stories of what's happening in Adeline's family and in lives like Michael Hubbard. This is our return on investment. It's why we do what we do. One more change life. The ways to give are gonna be on your screen today. And if you brought a physical gift with you, there are envelopes in the seatback pockets in front of you, and there are giving receptacles at the exits of all of our sanctuaries today. Lord, I pause for a moment before we jump into the word, and I just ask you to bless Michael after so many years and so many changes. He's trying to figure out what his life looked like now. Will you bless him, help him as we come around to resource him and get him back on his feet and jobs and all those kinds of things? Take care of him, Lord, and let him grow as a man of God and have as much impact here as he did in there, on the outside as he did on the inside. I pray for Adeline and her family, Lord. I get little letters laying on the side of my desk today. I'm praying for generational change in her family and so many more like them. God, would you send the harvest? Would you change people's lives? Would you take the seeds we plant and make eternal differences in people and let today's service be one of those things in Jesus' name? Amen and amen. Today we're coming to the end of a conversation that we've called just ask. If you want to change your life, you you need to change your questions. Change your life, change your questions, you'll change your life. And the first week, I invited you into what I called the question room where I wanted you to see the power and the possibility of questions. Last week, we talked about the question mark because literally every area of your life will be marked when you learn to ask more and better questions. This week, I want us to talk about the question at the center. Because I want us to see how question asking with the right motivation can deepen and enrich our relationship with God. Three weeks ago, when we started this conversation, I made you a promise that if you attend the series and you apply the principles to your life, you're gonna have the tools you need to develop deeper relationships, to have greater workplace effectiveness, and also possess a richer faith. And there's no doubt that this topic has resonated with people. Last week we made some resources available to you, and over 3,500 unique households access those resources to equip them to ask better questions in every area of their life. We spent the first couple weeks learning how those questions can create more intimacy in our relationships. And we talked about how the right questions can help us be more effective in our careers and our callings. We've learned that the right question at the right time is like a bucket being dropped down into the deep well of a person's soul, pulling out stuff that has never surfaced, pulling out the gold in people. And we've seen how the most influential people in any room are not the ones that have all the right answers, they're the ones that know what question to ask. And today we come to the third part of that promise, what I believe is the most important one. Not because your relationships and your career don't matter, they do, but your relationships and your career will eventually end. Your relationship with God is the one thing that is gonna last forever. And this practice of holy curiosity is something that can take your walk with God from something you just manage and maintain to something that makes it fully and vibrantly alive. Here's what I want us to grasp today. The person of deep faith is not the one that has all the answers. They're the ones that has learned to bring their real questions to a real God, the God who's been asking questions since the beginning of time. This is not a cynical questioning which closes the heart, but holy curiosity which opens it. And so today we're going to be asking what does holy curiosity look like when it's aimed at God? And what does it look like when it's turned in, like for my own growth in spiritual formation? In the fourth century, a man named Augustine, a brilliant, morally complicated, spiritually searching man, sat down to write the story of his life. And he had spent years chasing everything this world had to offer pleasure, philosophy, status, intellectual achievement, and he came up empty every single time. And when he finally found faith, a real, living, costly faith, he didn't open his memoir with a declaration. He opened it with a confession. And the very first thing he confessed at the beginning of his memoir answered the question that had been living inside him for decades. Augustine wrote in AD 397, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Now that may look like a statement, but it's more than that, because that statement addresses the question at the center of it all, the most honest question a human soul can carry. Why can't I get there? Why does nothing fully satisfy me? Why do I keep moving from one relationship to the next, one achievement to the next, one distraction to the next, and still I feel this low-grade ache in my heart that nothing ever seems to reach? There's a shared spiritual restlessness in the heart of every human being at one point or another in their life. And Augustine discovered after decades of searching that that ache is not really a problem to be solved. That ache is a compass that was pointing him somewhere. His restless ache is eventually what led him to God. And you need to hear this. If you feel that restlessness, if there's a part of you that's been in church for years, you've done all the right things, you've said all the right words, but it still feels like your faith is more performance and ritual than it is presence, your restlessness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. According to one of the greatest theological minds in all of Christian history, that restlessness in you may be the most honest and spiritually accurate thing about you. And like Augustine, that ache is pointing you somewhere. The question underneath all your other questions, the one that drives our searching, is Augustine's question. Isn't there more? Is this all there really is? That's not faithlessness to ask that question. That's the beginning of a faith that's honest enough to want the real thing and to want all it has to offer. In the book of Jeremiah, God says in Jeremiah 29, you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. God is speaking through the prophet to a group of people who have been exiled into slavery. These are people living in a foreign land that feel cut off from everything familiar, and they're wondering, where are you, God? Are you still accessible? And God's answer to them is not a formula or a method. He gave them a promise that was shaped like an invitation. He said, Seek me, pursue me with everything in you, not the cleaned up version of you, not the Sunday morning version of you, seek me with all of you. And then you will find me. The Hebrew word here for seek is darosh, which carries the force of diligent, thorough, earnest searching. This is the searching of somebody who cannot afford to lose what they are looking for. There is a holy desperation in their search. God says, seek me like that. He's not saying, I want you to casually wonder about me. He's saying, come after me, chase me, bring your restlessness, bring your questions, bring the parts of your soul you've never shown anybody. Seek me with all of that, and I promise you will find me. But here's the thing before we can ever come to God with those kinds of questions, somebody needs to remind us that we actually have permission to ask those kinds of questions. Because for far too many of us, what the Bible displays as an act of honest faith, for many of us that feels like sin. Because sadly, many in the church have taught us that questions directed at God are spiritually dangerous, that any feelings of doubt are just sinful. We were taught that the appropriate response to our confusion or our struggle was to suppress it and then just project certainty. And so we learned to perform our faith and hide our questions. And we got really good at giving canned answers and religious cliches. But somewhere along the way, we became strangers to our own inner lives. And I think it's really important for us to go back and look at something I said in the very first part of this conversation. There is a massive difference between questioning and genuine question asking. There's a big difference in asking questions as a cynic and asking them with the heart of genuine curiosity. The cynical questioner has already decided the answer before they ask the question. The questions for the cynic are not invitations, they're verdicts dressed in the costume of inquiry. Questions are weaponized in order to advance an argument. The cynic is armored, they're not open, but the person of holy curiosity genuinely doesn't know. So they lean in out of curiosity. They lean toward God rather than away from Him. They bring their confusion into the room instead of trying to leave it or hide it at the door. Cynicism says, I've been hurt. And the question is my weapon. Holy curiosity said, I've been hurt, and the question is my prayer. That is not the same posture. And learning to tell the difference of what's going on inside your heart is one of the most significant pieces of spiritual formation available to you. C.S. Lewis was probably the most celebrated Christian apologist of the 20th century, and he had already written his book called The Problem of Pain before the biggest questions and of his life attempted to unravel his faith. The problem of pain is a brilliant, rational argument for why human suffering does not disprove God. It's full of all the right answers. It is theologically brilliant. But then his wife Joy died of cancer. And in the aftermath of that loss, he started keeping a journal. He wrote down all of his raw, unfiltered, messy questions, stuff that was going on in his soul, and it was so raw that when he got ready to publish his journal, he wouldn't publish it under his own name. He published it under a pen name. And it was published as a title, A Grief Observed. And there was so much shame in C.S. Lewis because he's got this book, this incredible theological treatise about human suffering and faith. He's already written that. People love that. And then his life collapses, and he's got all of these raw emotions. But the book, he was too ashamed to put his name on, is the most spiritually authentic thing that he ever put on paper. Listen to a quote from A Grief Observed. Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain. And what do you find? A door slammed in your face. And a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. Meanwhile, where is God? This is the man that wrote mere Christianity, the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. And after these very real struggles, he didn't leave the faith. He brought his most desperate questions during the worst time of his life to a God that felt absent in his pain. But C.S. Lewis just kept seeking with all of him, with his doubts, with his questions, with his heartache, he leaned in with all of it. We've taught people in the church to hide their most honest moments. And in doing so, we've taught them how to keep God at arm's length exactly when they need him the most. Holy curiosity refuses to do that. Holy curiosity says, I'm bringing everything into this room, even the parts of me that embarrass me, even the questions I've been afraid to say out loud. Because if my faith cannot hold the weight of my honest questions, then it's not a faith worth keeping. And if God cannot handle what I bring to him, then he's not the God of the Bible. I want you to look to a scripture to see how holy curiosity can lead us to a place of what would be called honest wrestling. And I want to point you to a tiny, almost overlooked book that could be the theological center of this entire series. A prophet named Habakkuk is watching his nation fall apart. There's violence everywhere, the wicked are prospering, justice is being perverted, the people of God are suffering while the ungodly seem to be flourishing. Habakkun get it, he doesn't understand, but he does the honest and authentic thing. He wrestles with God about it by asking honest questions. Here's how he opens his book. How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry to you violence, but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? In asking these questions, Habakkuk is not walking away from God. He's walking straight toward him. He's bringing to God the very thing he can't recognise: the gap between what God has promised and what God seems to actually be doing. So he asks it out loud, how long? Why? These are not the questions of an atheist. These are the questions of a man who believes in God so deeply that he refuses to pretend the tension is not there. He is so committed to the relationship, he will not play like. He's not gonna let his walk with God get shallow. And the most beautiful thing about this conversation, God answers him. God doesn't rebuke him for asking, he doesn't withdraw his presence. God enters the conversation and he says to Habakkuk, I'm at work more than you know, in ways that you cannot see or understand. And Habakkuk's response to that answer is one of the most extraordinary declarations in all of Scripture. A man who brought his hardest questions to God never found a nice, neat resolution to those questions. He found something better. The conviction that God is trustworthy even in the mystery. Habakkuk declared in verse 17 of chapter 3 though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, and in an agrarian farming society, that is total devastation. Even if there is total devastation, verse 18, yet I will rejoice in the Lord and I will be joyful in my God, my Savior. This is not the declaration of a man who got all of his questions answered. It's the declaration of a man who asked his hardest questions, stayed in the conversation, and found that the God on the other end of that conversation is worth trusting even when the answers don't come when and the way we want them to. That is the end game of holy curiosity, not tidy answers, but a trust that's deep enough to hold on to both our questions and our faith at the same time. And if you need more permission to bring your hardest questions to God, remember Job. Job lost everything: his children, his wealth, his health, and he's sitting in the ash heap of his life when three friends come to him to quote unquote help. These friends represent the voice of orthodox religious certainty. Their theology is clean and tidy. And their logic is this God is good and God is just, and so for this to be happening to you, you must have sin in your life. So if you want it to change, you need to confess and be restored. But Job refuses to do what they say because he doesn't know why this is happening, and he doesn't pretend that he does. And across 38 chapters, he does something that would terrify most faith communities. He argues with God, he demands an audience, he insists that God account for what's happening. It's messy and raw and theologically unruly. In chapter 23, he says, if only I knew where to find him, if only I could go to his dwelling, I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. At the end of the book, God shows up. And there's a moment there toward the end that should reorder everything you've ever been taught about bringing your questions to God. Job 42, verse 7. After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphas the Timenite, I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has. Honest wrestling is more faithful than false certainty. Bringing your real questions to God honors him more than performing a faith you don't actually possess. He's not threatened by your questions. And don't miss this. At the end of it all, Job says something that captures the essence of holy curiosity. Job 42, verse 5, Job says, My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Job's questions didn't lead him away from God. They led him into the most direct, personal, transforming encounter with God that he had ever experienced. He went from a secondhand faith built on what he had heard, what others had told him, to a firsthand faith. Faith that had been forged in the fire of honest wrestling and questioning. That's what your hard questions can do when you bring them to God leaning in instead of away with the right heart, right motive. They don't diminish your faith, they transform you and deepen your faith. Now, for a moment, I just want us to change the direction of our questions. We've been thinking upward. I want us to think inward for a moment because there is an untapped power for spiritual formation in the questions that you ask yourself. Most of us are practiced in the outer life of faith, the attendance, the services, we talk the lingo, but the inner life, the questions about what's really happening in our soul, what we really believe, what we really want, what we're really afraid of, that territory remains uncharted in our life. And David understood this. In Psalm 139, he models a prayer that most of us have never had the courage to pray. The Psalm opens with 18 verses of David standing in awe of how completely God knows him. David said things like, God knows when he sits and when he rises, God knows his thoughts from afar, before a word is ever on his tongue. God already knows it. God knows when he's he God was there when he was, it was present, when he was being knit together in his mother's womb. There's nowhere David said that I can go, that he is not already there. And then, after 18 verses of resting in the reality of being utterly known by God, David prays this: Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way of everlasting life. Search me and know my heart. You got to see what David's doing. He's not trying to give God more information. He says he's already completely settled the fact in those first 18 verses. God already knows it all. So what David is saying is, God, I want to see about me what you see and know about me. And that's one of the most important questions you can bring into your prayer life. God, what do you see in me that I cannot see in myself? What have I been avoiding? What is the question I'm afraid to sit with? What sin do I allow to go unchallenged in my heart? And notice the posture. This is not self-condemnation. The whole psalm is soaked in the security of being fully loved by an omniscient God. And it is from that security, a place of being fully known and still fully loved, that David says, search me. He's not asking from fear, he's asking from a place of deep trust. The questions that arise from Psalm 139 are not, what's wrong with me? Why am I this way? They are, God, what do you see in me? What is keeping me from the fullness of the life you have for me? Those questions, ask in the presence of a God who already sees and already knows, those are the kinds of questions that change people from the inside out. Now, let me give you something practical that you can actually start putting into practice today. In the art of asking better questions, J.R. Briggs describes a practice he calls the grand question. It's simple. Choose one deep, honest, personally significant question and carry it with you for six months. Not six minutes, not six days, focus on it for six months. Journal about it, pray with it, bring it into your quiet time, take it on your daily walks, bring it into weekend worship, take it to work, press on it, turn it over, let it press on you. Briggs uses an example of a grand question he most recently wrestled with for the last six months. He said, This was an important question in this season of our culture filled with divisiveness and hate. Here was his grand question. Why is it that the more right I think I am, the less kind I think I have to be? That question would reshape the heart of anybody that was willing to live with it. Because it goes straight to the root of pride and arrogance and certainty and how we treat people we disagree with. And it can't be truthfully answered in a day. It's the kind of question that does slow surgery on the soul. The Psalms model these kinds of sustained, unhurried, living with the question kind of prayers. Psalm 13 opens with multiple cries of how long, O Lord. It goes over and over again. Psalms of lament all through the assembled Psalms in your Bible are like this. They're called Psalms of Lament. This is not a one-time prayer. This is a posture of asking God over a sustained period of time. He is silent, and you're in the waiting, so you ask. And Psalm 13 starts this way: How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? That's how it opens. Here's how that psalm closes in verse 5. Notice how it ends. But I trust in your unfailing love, my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me. There's a shift. They're all desperate questions, but then after the questions, there is an act of surrender and trust. That is the structure of every psalm of lament in your Bible. You bring the questions, you live in the tension, and somewhere in carrying that, something shifts. Not because all the questions get answered, but because the relationship gets deeper. A lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust. The Psalm of Lament is a pathway to praise, but you can't skip the questioning and then go to the praise, or you're gonna have some fake religious experience. It's gotta be raw, it's gotta be real. You gotta be honest first and let the questions move you to the praise. Let me give you some examples of grand questions that you can sit with, and you can use any or all of these, but but these are written for specific people in specific places of life dealing with certain sticking points. Here's a grand question for the person who knows the theology, but they don't feel the love. What would I do differently if I truly believed I was loved as much as Jesus says I am? Here's a grand question for the person avoiding something. What is the question I keep avoiding bringing to God? And why am I afraid? And what am I afraid he will say? Here's the grand question for a performer. Where in my life am I still performing for God rather than resting in him? Here's a grand question for the person with an inherited faith. Somebody else gave it to you, or you're living on your mom and dad's spiritual coach. What would it mean for me to move from a secondhand faith to a firsthand one? Here's a grand question for the person who senses God speaking but hasn't slowed down long enough to hear what he's saying. What is God asking of me right now that I have been too busy or too afraid to answer? Don't choose all of them, just for a period of time, pick one and carry it and let the weight of it sit with you. Pick the one that hits you the most when we read them. And if none of them did, come up with your own, but carry it, walk with it, and let it transform you. Before we close, I want you to see the question Jesus is asking of you today. It's the same question he asked two disciples that started following him in the gospel of John. They had heard about him, they see him and recognize him, so they slip up behind him and they're just following him. They don't know he knows. And he turns around and suddenly says to them, What do you want? It's the same question behind the one he asked Bartimaeus in Mark 10, What do you want me to do for you? Or the one he asked in John 5 with a paralyzed man, do you want to get well? Or what he asked of Peter in John 21, do you love me? Jesus keeps asking variations of the same question because he knows what we know. Very few of us actually are certain about what we really want. We know what we're supposed to want. We know how to give all the right answers, but underneath it all, what do we really want? Augustine spent decades not knowing the answer to that question. And he chased everything else first. He exhausted it all and he came up restless and empty. And he discovered that what he had been wanting all along was the one thing he had been running past. Jesus is asking you the same question today. What do you want? Not what are you doing for me? Not what do you know about me? What do you want? Do you want the real thing? Do you want a faith that is based on a first hand encounter, not something that's fake or borrowed? Do you want to stop performing and start encountering? Do you want an honest, intimate prayer life where you bring your honest self to God instead of the version of you you think he wants to see? Because if the answer to any of those questions is a yes, even if it is a tentative, bruised, unsure yes, you're already moving in the right direction. That desire is the beginning of seeking, and seeking that way is the beginning of finding. He promised that to a group of exiled slaves, wondering if he was still there. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. The doubts, the questions, everything you've tried to hide, seek me with all of you. Don't try to dress it up for Sunday. Seek me with all of you, and you will find me. That's the promise. Three weeks ago, we started in the garden at the beginning. We heard one of the first questions ever asked was asked by God coming through the garden in the cool of the day, pursuing a sinful, broken man and woman. He said to them, Where are you? And he wasn't asking because he didn't know, he was asking because he was pursuing the question itself was an expression of his love. And the entire Bible, from that garden scene to the last page of the book of Revelation, is the story of a God who keeps asking, who stops for one person in a crowd, or who stops for a prophet in the middle of a national disaster and says, Ask me. I can handle whatever you bring. And He's the God asking you right now in the middle of whatever you're going through, where are you? What do you want? Do you love me? And He's only asking because He's pursuing. We said this from the beginning. The quality of your life, your relationships, your workplace effectiveness, and your faith will be determined by the quality of the questions you're willing to ask. You don't have to live with all the answers. You never did. You just have to keep asking. You need to be a spiritually hungry seeker with holy curiosity. And when you are, you can trust him with your questions and you can trust him with your life. I want to challenge you to ask the most important question of the Lord today you'll ever ask him. Ever. The most important question you can ever ask the Lord is, Will you be my Lord and Savior? That's an invitation. Because as powerful as he is, he doesn't come into the heart of any person until he's invited. Scripture says he stands at the door and knocks. But the door of our heart has to be opened. And I really challenge you. I meet people all the time who say, I don't know, something's happening, and I want to do this. I want this to be real. I want to follow Jesus, but I'm waiting until all of my questions get answered. And I just laugh. I've been pursuing Jesus for the last 35 years and have three theological degrees and probably read about a hundred books a year on faith and apologetics and philosophy. And I said, I got more questions today than I've ever had in my life. But he takes me with my questions, he transforms me. All I know is that man on the middle cross took my place. He gave his life for me, and because he gave his life for me, I'm covered in the righteousness of God. I'm not worthy in myself, but in the righteousness of Christ, I can stand before God, whether that's today or 50 years from now, I can stand before the righteousness of God because I am in Christ. And a simple invitation, Jesus, will you be the Lord and Savior of my life? Can surrender your heart, you can be in Christ, and you can work the rest of your life when getting your questions answered. Would you stand with me across this room today and across our campus family? And I'm going to ask our prayer team for this service if they would to make themselves available and prepare to serve you. Look, we're here, whatever you need prayer for. You need a miracle at work and a relationship. Um, you need you have needs. I prayed for people already this morning heading in for some scans they need they need God to work on Tuesday. Up I mean, just there's a lot of burdens being carried here, and that's what we're here today to pray for you. The greatest honor of our life would be to sit with you in prayer while you ask that question. We can lead you in that moment if you want to help Jesus. You come into my life, will you be my Lord and Savior? I want to give everything to you the good, the bad, the in-between. Let us pray with you about that today, Lord. I pray you bless them and keep them. That you'd make your face shine down upon them, that you'd be gracious to them and turn your countenance their direction. And as a people, I pray you would give us your peace and a new level of holy curiosity. In Jesus' name, amen. These altars are open today. God bless you.